Zurmo is starting to look like the UN

Who would have thought it would be possible to translate Zurmo into Swahili? Before the language tool was built by Zurmo community evangelist Sergey Fayngold, Swahili was definitely not on our radar screens.

A couple of months ago we announced a new tool that makes the language translation process much more collaborative. The tool, which is powered by a Drupal l10n server, integrates with the Zurmo.org Community Forums, where members can contribute within teams corresponding to specific language translations. Suggestions are actively checked and moderated by other team members.

Now we are proud to report that translations made with the tool will be merged directly into the Zurmo application with the release of Zurmo 1.5

Why does this matter?

The language tool lets us bring Zurmo to more people. It means that new labels are added much faster – and moderated by native speakers. Additionally, better translation suggestions are implemented through an out-of-the-box release management tool, making it easier to improve older versions of the application.

For end users, this means you will be able to simply pick your language in the administration settings of the application. Before 1.5 your options were English, Italian, French and German, and Spanish. Now get ready. Dust off your passport. We’d like to welcome:

Bosnian

Bulgarian

Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)

Czech

Danish

Dutch

Finnish

Greek

Hebrew

Indonesian

Persian

Polish

Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal)

Romanian

Russian

Swahili

Thai

Turkish

Is that an extensive list, or what? Zurmo is turning into the United Nations. We love it.

Additionally, in keeping with the spirit of gamification within both our Zurmo software and our community, we’ve of course included progress bars and contribution statistics. A leaderboard? Sure, why not. We threw one in that lists top contributors according to translation count along with other key metrics.

Thanks again to contributor Sergey Fayngold, a Hamburg-based PHP and MySQL developer who specializes in building Drupal modules, for building and maintaining the tool.